The water rose at Battery Park. Scientists said they did not know for sure if Hurricane Sandy could be tied directly to climate change, a question on the minds of many along the storm’s path

Published: October 31, 2012

From the darkened living rooms of Lower Manhattan to the wave-battered shores of Lake Michigan, the question is occurring to millions of people at once: Did the enormous scale and damage fromHurricane Sandy have anything to do with climate change?

A hurricane barrier in Stamford, Conn. Experts say that the storm, whatever its causes, should be seen as a warning. More Photos »

Hesitantly, climate scientists offered an answer this week that is likely to satisfy no one, themselves included. They simply do not know for sure if the storm was caused or made worse by human-induced global warming.

They do know, however, that the resulting storm surge along the Atlantic coast was almost certainly intensified by decades of sea-level rise linked to human emissions of greenhouse gases. And they emphasized that Hurricane Sandy, whatever its causes, should be seen as a foretaste of trouble to come as the seas rise faster, the risks of climate change accumulate and the political system fails to respond.

By the time Hurricane Sandy hit the Northeast coast on Monday, upending lives across the Eastern half of the country, it had become a freakish hybrid of a large, late-season hurricane and a winter storm more typical of the middle latitudes. Though by no means unprecedented, that type of hybrid storm is rare enough that scientists have not studied whether it is likely to become more common in a warming climate.

“My profession hasn’t done its homework,” said Kerry A. Emanuel, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “I think there’s going to be a ton of papers that come out of this, but it’s going to take a couple of years.”

Scientists note that a warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapor, which in principle supplies more energy for storms of all types. The statistics seem to show that certain types of weather extremes, notably heat waves and heavy downpours, are becoming more common.

But how those general principles will influence hurricanes has long been a murky and contentious area of climate science. Most scientists expect that the number of Atlantic hurricanes will actually stay steady or decline in coming decades as the climate warms, but that the proportion of intense, damaging storms is likely to rise.

The experts differ sharply on whether such a rise can already be detected in hurricane statistics. Recent decades seem to show an increase in hurricane strength, but hurricanes tend to rise and fall in a recurring cycle over time, so it is possible that natural variability accounts for the recent trends.

Jeff Masters, a meteorologist and founder of a popular Web site, Weather Underground, suspects some kind of shift is under way. The number of hurricanes and tropical storms over the past three years has been higher than average, with 19 named storms in both 2010 and 2011 and 19 so far this hurricane season, which ends Nov. 30. According to the National Hurricane Center there are, on average, 12 named storms each season.

“The climatology seems to have changed,” Dr. Masters said. “We’re getting these very strange, very large storms with very low central pressures that don’t have that much wind at the surface.”

Hurricanes draw their energy from warm waters in the top layer of the ocean. And several scientists pointed out this week that parts of the western Atlantic were remarkably warm for late October as Hurricane Sandy passed over, as much as 5 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal for this time of year.

Kevin E. Trenberth, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., said that natural variability probably accounted for most of that temperature extreme. But, he added, human-induced global warming has raised the overall temperature of the ocean surface by about one degree Fahrenheit since the 1970s. So global warming probably contributed a notable fraction of the energy on which the storm thrived — maybe as much as 10 percent, he said.

Dr. Trenberth said that many of Sandy’s odd features, including its large scale, derived from its origin as a merger of two weather systems that converged in the western Atlantic.

“My view is that a lot of this is chance,” he said. “A hybrid storm is certainly one which is always in the cards, and it’s one we’ve always worried about.”

Winds knocked out power as far west as Michigan. But the most serious damage, including the flooding of New York’s subway tunnels and the broad destruction along the Jersey Shore, came as the storm pushed roiling ocean waters onto land, a phenomenon known as storm surge. The surge set records in some places, including the Battery in Lower Manhattan.

Globally, the ocean rose about eight inches in the last century, and the rate seems to have accelerated to about a foot a century.

Scientists say most of the rise is a direct consequence of human-induced climate change. Ocean water expands when it warms, accounting for some of the rise, and land ice is melting worldwide, dumping extra water into the ocean. Scientists say they believe the rate will accelerate further, so that the total increase by the end of this century could exceed three feet.

A version of this article appeared in print on November 1, 2012, on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline: Are Humans to Blame? Science Is Out.

"WASHINGTON — President Obama toured the storm-tossed boardwalks of New Jersey’s ravaged coastline on Wednesday, in a vivid display of big-government muscle and bipartisan harmony that confronted Mitt Romney with a vexing challenge just as he returned to the campaign trail in Florida."

"President Obama and Mitt Romney seemed determined not to discuss climate change in this campaign. So thanks to Hurricane Sandy for forcing the issue: Isn’t it time to talk not only about weather, but also about climate?"

"With Hurricane Sandy’s surge receding, the Oyster Creek nuclear plant, in Lacey Township, N.J., ended its “alert” at 3:52 a.m. on Wednesday and returned to normal operations, meaning a shutdown for refueling that began a week before the storm."

Tuesday, October 30, 2012

"The flooded streets formed a barrier around the flames, keeping firefighters away as the blaze, fueled by Hurricane Sandy’s neck-snapping winds and undeterred by its steady rains, leapt from house to house, then block to block."

"The New York region began the daunting process on Tuesday of rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, a storm that remade the landscape and rewrote the record books as it left behind a tableau of damage, destruction and grief."

Well, we’re safe, comfortable — and trapped. I don’t know if you can drive across a downed power line that’s stretched right across your driveway, but I guess no point in trying. I hope PSE&G doesn’t take too many days to at least remove the line, never mind actually restoring power..

Limited blogging due to limited bandwidth (and don’t be surprised if comment moderation lags, since both here and at the Times conditions are, shall we say, not ideal). But I thought I’d weigh in on this post by Brad DeLong.

Brad has fun with Jonathan Martin of Politico, who thinks that liberals will be deeply disheartened to learn that Nate Silver “admits” that he’s mainly relying on public polls for his forecast. Of course, Nate has been clear about that all along — and what should he be doing? And look: the message from the polls is very clear: national surveys show a tight race or a slight Romney lead, but state polls — which are telling us about the electoral vote — show a clear if narrow Obama advantage in enough states to win the electoral college. Those polls would have to be off, systematically, by about 2 percent for Romney to win. So the odds are in Obama’s favor.

Oh, and don’t quote some poll or other that seems to say different. Polls have a margin of error (duh). This means that if there are a lot of polls, say of Ohio, sheer luck of the draw will produce a couple of polls seeming to tell a different story. That’s why all the serious analysts rely on poll averages, and stick to those averages rather than picking and choosing.

But Martin’s tweet also reveals a broader issue in reporting, which I’ve commented on before, I think (no time to search): the unhealthy cult of the inside scoop.

A lot of political journalism, and even reporting on policy issues, is dominated by the search for the “secret sauce”, as Martin puts it: the insider who knows What’s Really Going On. Background interviews with top officials are regarded as gold, and the desire to get those interviews often induces reporters to spin on demand.

But such inside scoops are rarely — I won’t say never, but rarely — worth a thing. My experience has been that careful analysis of publicly available information almost always trumps the insider approach.

This is sort of obviously true in election season: in a vast, diverse country, no amount of talking with big shots (who are pushing an agenda) — or for that matter hanging out at campaign events and trying to assess the mood — is a substitute for polls that collectively sample tens of thousands of voters.

It’s even more obviously true on economic matters, where top officials basically work from the same data everyone else has, and a smart economist is almost always a better guide than the Minister of Silly Walks.

Remarkably, it has even been true for national security. Reporters with top-level access got completely snookered by the lies about Iraq, while many ordinary concerned citizens, looking at what we actually seemed to know, figured out early on that the Bush administration was cooking up a false case for war.

Now obviously there are some personal stakes here. If the right way to assess an election is by parsing the polls, this elevates nerds from nowhere at the expense of political reporters who spend their lives cultivating contacts, and really aren’t comfortable with numbers. And no doubt my own tribalism makes me especially sympathetic to nerds like me.

But I don’t think that’s all there is to what I’m saying. The truth is that anyone who understands numbers and has access to polling data is in a position to make a very informed judgment about the state of the race; and nobody who doesn’t understand numbers is in a position to do the same, no matter who he knows.

"In the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which left a trail of deadly destruction, devastating power failures and extensive flooding, millions of people in the New York metropolitan region spent Tuesday assessing the damage and preparing for the possibility that it could be days or even weeks before life returned to normal."

Monday, October 29, 2012

"Hurricane Sandy battered the mid-Atlantic region on Monday, its powerful gusts and storm surges causing once-in-a-generation flooding in coastal communities, knocking down trees and power lines and leaving about two million people — including a large swath of Manhattan — in the rain-soaked dark. At least seven deaths in the New York region were tied to the storm."

Soon NYC will be under attack by Tropical Storm Sandy, just like last year by Irene. It seems though, this time it will be worse; why?

Hurricanes are fed by water and heat. Given the drought in the central part of the US, I reckon, that water has to go somewhere. Heat, I can feel it right here in the greater Chicago area. Besides today we have a full moon. Perfect Storm!

When the Sun, Earth and Moon align, we get more gravity effects. Tides will be higher. More than 10 feet in some areas of the hurricane path.

These were worries of the Pirates of the Caribbean, now the Wall Street Pirates are feeling it.

Does it mean something?

I am not superstitious, but it will be karma if the 1% get a little signal to warn them off, of their wayward ways.

"Hurricane Sandy churned relentlessly through the Atlantic Ocean on Monday on the way to carving what forecasters agreed would be a devastating path on land that is expected to paralyze life for millions of people in more than a half-dozen states, with extensive evacuations, once-in-a-generation flooding, widespread power failures and mass transit disruptions."

Sunday, October 28, 2012

"Nostalgia for the Light (Spanish: Nostalgia de la Luz) is a documentary released in 2010 by Patricio Guzmán to address the lasting impacts of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship.[1] Guzmán focuses on the similarities between astronomers researching humanity’s past, in an astronomical sense, and the struggle of many Chilean women who still search, after decades, for the remnants of their relatives executed during the dictatorship. Patricio Guzmán narrates the documentary himself and the documentary includes interviews and commentary from those affected and from astronomers and archeologists."

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

In the funky, crunchy, slightly gritty college town where I live, we have a pedestrian mall called the Ithaca Commons. You can probably picture it: A gem store. A hemp shop. Lots of places to buy hand-made candles.

And a scale model of the solar system … five billion times smaller than the real thing.

Admit it. You have no real feeling for the size of the solar system. That’s O.K. Nobody else does either. Even knowing the numbers doesn’t help much. If I tell you the Earth is about 8,000 miles in diameter and 93,000,000 miles from the Sun, does that give you any sense of the distances involved? No, because the numbers are too big. Things that are so far removed from our daily experience — like quarks, and dinosaurs, and Kim Kardashian — are inherently hard to understand.

The designers of the Sagan Walk made the solar system accessible by shrinking it to a human scale. Each planet is displayed in its own monolith.

Leah Strogatz

As you stroll from one to another, you can’t help noticing that the first four planets are really close together. It takes a few seconds, a few tens of steps, to walk from the Sun to Mercury and then on to Venus, Earth and Mars. By contrast, Jupiter is a full two-minute walk down the block, just past Moosewood Restaurant, waiting for someone to stop by and admire it. The remaining planets are even lonelier, each marooned in its own part of town. The whole walk, from the Sun to Pluto, is about three-quarters of a mile long and takes about 15 minutes.

The planets themselves are scaled down too, in exact proportion. The tiniest ones, Mercury and Pluto, look like little grains of couscous. The Earth resembles a pea. The largest ones, Jupiter and Saturn, are the size of donut holes. The Sun is about 10 times wider still, the diameter of a serving plate.

The Sagan Walk is the ultimate in egocentric fantasies: it centers the solar system on you. And I don’t mean that figuratively; it’s literally true, in a certain numerical sense.

To see what I mean, let’s begin with the basics of handling large numbers. The key is to avoid them where possible; try to work with numbers close to 1 instead.

For example, you wouldn’t state your height in billions of nanometers. It’s not that it wouldn’t be correct; it just seems silly and it would be hard to work with, because people aren’t very good at comprehending numbers like a billion. The right scale for human height is meters, not nanometers.

Or think about currencies where even the most insignificant trinket costs millions of lira. It’s annoying and confusing. That’s because one lira has ceased to be the right scale for that currency. They should be using mega-lira, not lira (as Turkey did in 2005 with the introduction of the “New Turkish Lira,” defined to equal 1 million old liras).

Another helpful tactic is to express numbers in “scientific notation.” That way of writing them highlights their most essential features and shunts their minor details aside.

For example, take the number 1,234. Round it down to the nearest power of 10, which is 1,000. Then write 1,234 = 1.234 x 1,000. Count the zeros (in this case, 3); pop that number into an exponent to get the corresponding power of 10 (here, 103), and stick whatever is left over out in front (1.234). The result is 1,234 expressed in scientific notation: 1.234 x 103. Its “order of magnitude” is said to be 3, because that’s how many powers of 10 are in it.

Why bother? Because scientific notation teases out what’s important (the powers of 10) from what’s less important (the leftovers like 1.234, which are always less than 10, by definition, and in that sense close to 1). When you’re trying to make rough estimates, the powers of 10 are what matter. They give the lion’s share of the answer.

Now let’s apply these ideas to the solar system. What happens if we shrink all the pertinent distances and diameters by a factor of five billion, as the designers of the Sagan Walk did?

Consider the longest length scales, the distances from the Sun to the farthest planets. After the five-billion-fold reduction, those previously unfathomable distances shrink to being around a kilometer, which — in terms of all-important you — is roughly a thousand times longer than the one-meter scale of your body. That’s 10 x 10 x 10 times longer than you. Three powers of 10.

Next, look what happens to the shortest length scales, the diameters of the tiniest planets like Mercury and Pluto. They become millimeter-size, or about a thousand times shorter than you. Another three powers of 10, but in the opposite direction.

Which puts you right in middle. You are now the 1, the measure of all things.

The Sagan Walk is a remarkable achievement in the visualization of vastness. It succeeds because its designers chose the right reduction factor and because the six orders of magnitude in the solar system happen to be within our perceptual power to grasp all at once.

But for many other problems that scientists study, no single reduction or enlargement will suffice. A good strategy in such “multiscale” cases is to use a series of reductions and enlargements that progress smoothly from one to the next.

This was the approach taken by Charles and Ray Eames, the husband-and-wife design team who gave us the iconic short film “Powers of Ten.” They centered their view of the universe on a couple enjoying a lazy picnic in the park.

Instead of the single scale factor used in the Sagan Walk, “Powers of Ten” uses a continuous zoom — a visualization technique that seems commonplace today, but which blew the minds of its audience in 1968.

The movie zooms through 40 powers of 10, starting from the picnickers, then pans back to the largest scales of the known universe, and finally reverses direction in a dizzying descent down to the sub-nuclear scale of quarks. The genius of the movie is that as time ticks by linearly, like 1, 2, 3, 4, the field of view contracts or expands exponentially, changing tenfold at each step from 10 meters to 100 to 1,000 to 10,000. In effect, the counting takes place in the exponent — 101, 102, 103, 104 — and not in the number itself.

This style of thinking, this powers-of-10 mentality, is our best hope for making sense of the immensity of the natural world. What makes subjects like biology and climate science so hard is not just that they involve so many variables; it’s that the crucial phenomena in them occur over such a wide range of scales. Biologists need to contend with everything from nano-size DNA molecules on up to cells, organs, organisms and ecosystems. For climate scientists the relevant scales go from the molecular (the photochemistry of ozone) to the global (the fluid mechanics of the jet stream). Many of the great scientific puzzles of our time have this multiscale character.

A contentious example, especially in this election season, is inequality. The distribution of wealth in the United States spans at least 10 powers of 10, ranging from people whose net worth is measured in tens of billions of dollars, to those with barely a dollar to their names. This disparity dwarfs even the six powers of 10 in the solar system. As such, the distribution is extremely difficult to depict on a single graph, at least on the standard kinds of plots with linear axes, which is why you never see it displayed on one page.

Depending on your politics, you may think that wealth inequality is a problem to be solved, or irrelevant, or an encouraging sign of a free society. But whether you believe we need more inequality or less, I think we can all agree that it would be helpful to understand the actual distribution. Unfortunately its multiscale character confounds us.

This is clear from the work of Michael I. Norton and Dan Ariely. In 2005 they surveyed a representative sample of more than 5,500 Americans — men and women, rich and poor, conservative and liberal, young and old — and asked them two questions: How much wealth inequality is there in America? And how much should there be, ideally?

Norton and Ariely found that people on both sides of the political spectrum grossly underestimated the extent of inequality. The typical respondent believed that the top 20 percent owned 59 percent of the nation’s wealth, much less than the 84 percent the top quintile actually owned (at the time of the survey). Respondents also thought the two quintiles at the bottom — the poorest 40 percent — owned 10 percent of the nation’s wealth, when the reality was that their two slices totaled 0.3 percent of the American pie, the two nearly invisible slivers in the chart.

Yet surprisingly, when asked to describe the ideal distribution they’d like to see, respondents of all ages, classes, genders and party affiliations agreed. They’d all prefer a distribution much less extreme than the status quo: the top quintile would hold about 32 percent of the wealth, while the poorest quintile would have over 10 percent.

It’s nice we can all agree about something for once, even if it happens to be a more equal distribution of wealth than exists in any country on Earth … and probably in our solar system.

NOTES

1. The Carl Sagan Planet Walk is truly awe-inspiring. Come visit us here in Ithaca, N.Y., and see for yourself. But if you can’t make the trip, this video will give you an impression of what it’s like. For more information, including pictures, maps and history, check out the Sagan Walk’s official Web page and this blog post by J.W. Ocker.

A new station was added to the Sagan Walk on Sep. 28, 2012. Representing Alpha Centauri — the nearest star to the sun — it is located at the Imiloa Astronomy Center on the University of Hawaii’s Hilo campus. The Sagan Walk now measures 5,000 miles from end to end, making it the world’s largest exhibition.

For those unfamiliar with Carl Sagan, start by listening to his meditation on a photograph of Earth taken by the Voyager spacecraft as it looked back from Saturn, 4 billion miles away, in which our planet appears as a single pixel, a “pale blue dot.” His words will move you.

2. The federal budget is another important topic that bewilders most of us because of the gigantic numbers involved. In an illuminating blog post, the mathematician Terry Tao brings those numbers down to size by converting them to their household equivalents, using a conversion factor of 100 million to 3. Thus, when you hear about the government collecting or spending $100 million, think of it as $3 in family terms. Tao credits the idea for this rescaling to an observation made by the economist Greg Mankiw. In 2009, when President Obama called for a $100 million cut by federal agencies as a sign of fiscal discipline, Mankiw noted that this would be like a family with an annual spending of $100,000 and a budget shortfall of $34,000 deciding to cut $3, “approximately the cost of one latte at Starbucks.”

"No matter who is elected president of the United States on November 6, there are bound to be new cuts to next year’s federal budget. The question is whether they will be really really big or just sort of big. Congress can avoid the really, really big (and semi-random) cuts during its lame-duck session between the election and the New Year if it negotiates a path away from the so-called “fiscal cliff” that is anticipated in early January. That’s when certain automatic tax increases and spending cuts are scheduled to take place. But there is no doubt that, at the very least, plain old cuts in spending are on their way."

After hours of computation with professor Jeremiah Ostriker, and Jason Li of Princeton, they conclude that this flow is almost chaotic. It is hard to get a straight answer. General Relativity is a non-linear mathematical theory, just like the weather equations, that Edward Lorenz studied many years ago, not very far from Princeton, at MIT.

So, is the Massive Black Hole in the center, asleep?

Very likely yes.

When will it wake up?

It seems to me, that it is almost a coin toss. What about tomorrow? What about December 21, 2012?

"The Milky Way centre hosts a supermassive Black Hole (BH) with a mass of ~4*10^6 M_Sun. Sgr A*, its electromagnetic counterpart, currently appears as an extremely weak source with a luminosity L~10^-9 L_Edd. The lowest known Eddington ratio BH. However, it was not always so; traces of "glorious" active periods can be found in the surrounding medium. We review here our current view of the X-ray emission from the Galactic Center (GC) and its environment, and the expected signatures (e.g. X-ray reflection) of a past flare. We discuss the history of Sgr A*'s past activity and its impact on the surrounding medium. The structure of the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ) has not changed significantly since the last active phase of Sgr A*. This relic torus provides us with the opportunity to image the structure of an AGN torus in exquisite detail."

Thursday, October 11, 2012

"As stars age, they often shed their skins, so to speak, casting off expansive shells of dust and gas into interstellar space. A new look at the shell surrounding a type of aging star called a red giant shows that the star's ejected husk carries in its structure the imprint of its formation and subsequent evolution."

Tuesday, October 09, 2012

"Sizzling temperatures and lack of rains have scorched maize or corn crops across eastern Europe, further reducing global supplies already hit after the worst drought in the United States in 50 years."

"As it flares out of the distant Oort Cloud, the newly discovered comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) appears to be heading on a trajectory that could make for one of the most spectacular night-sky events in living memory. Why is this comet expected to be so unique? Two reasons:"

Wednesday, October 03, 2012

At the end of the day, all the teaching and learning tools, end up with knowledge correctly learned, incorrectly learned, or completely forgotten. I believe that relevancy plays a big part in this process. My children were home-schooled part of their lives. Maybe their social development was affected. It didn't help that one of them was already thirteen, when we came from Mexico!

I am very proud of both my children, and I myself have some trouble relating to people. I basically keep to myself, learning and learning all the time. I am even taking an Artificial Intelligence (AI) class at edX.org

How do we learn?

I am impressed with the AI class from UCBerkeley. Besides the video and audio provided, there are transcripts appearing at the same time. Then there are quizzes, and there is a midterm coming.